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ASCO Annual Meeting

Two targeted therapies in development have demonstrated encouraging activity as potential treatments targeting hard-to-target driver alterations in lung cancer. During the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting,&nbsp;Christine M. Lovly, MD, PhD, reviewed the early promising findings for TAK-788 for patients with&nbsp;non&ndash;small cell lung cancer harboring&nbsp;<em>EGFR</em> exon 20 insertions and for BLU-667 for patients with&nbsp;<em>RET&nbsp;</em>rearrangements.&nbsp;&nbsp;

According to a subgroup analysis from the phase III IMpower150 trial presented at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting, the addition of immunotherapy to&nbsp;bevacizumab and a chemotherapy doublet improved progression-free survival in patients with&nbsp;non&ndash;small cell lung cancer and baseline liver metastases.

Nearly double the number of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer would be eligibile for clinical trial enrollment if a&nbsp;broader set of eligibility criteria proposed by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and Friends of Cancer Research was implemented,&nbsp;according to data presented at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting.

According to data from the phase II EV-201 study presented at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting, 44% of patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial cancer achieved responses with enfortumab vedotin. This includes 12% of patients reached a complete response to treatment.&nbsp;Median overall survival time for patients was 11.7 months.

A subcutaneous formulation of daratumumab showed similar efficacy to the original intravenous formulation of daratumumab in the phase III COLUMBA trial of patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma. The subcutaenous flat-dose of daratumumab also showed a reduction in the treatment burden, according to results presented at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting.

Cemiplimab demonstrated substantial antitumor activity and induced durable responses in patients with locally advanced cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma who were enrolled in the pivotal EMPOWER-CSCC-1 phase II study, and these results were similar to previously reported data in patients with metastatic CSCC enrolled in the same study.

Racial disparities in time to cancer treatment are nearly eliminated since the expansion of Medicaid, according to the results from a study presented at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting. Analysis on the impact of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion showed Medicaid was associated with a 6.1 percentage point improvement in timely access to cancer care treatment for African American patients versus 2.1 in white patients.

According to&nbsp;a study authors performed to call attention to the need to address socioeconomic disparities that influence treatment outcomes, higher incomes and having private insurance were associated with a significantly greater probability of survival for patients with multiple myeloma.

Survival was increased with the treatment of enzalutamide plus standard of care compared with the use of other&nbsp;non-steroidal anti-androgens plus SOC for patients with&nbsp;metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer. Results from an interim analysis&nbsp;of the phase III ENZAMET trial presented at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting showed that 80% of men with mHSPC were alive after 3 years with enzalutamide treatment compared with 72%.&nbsp;

Patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer who received&nbsp;apalutamide plus androgen deprivation therapy had a 33% reduced risk of death compared with patients taking androgen deprivation therapy alone in the phase III TITAN trial. Topline results from the trial were&nbsp;presented at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting and simultaneously published in the <em>New England Journal of Medicine.</em>

Toni Choueiri, MD, director, Lank Center for Genitourinary Oncology, director, Kidney Cancer Center, senior physician, at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Jerome and Nancy Kohlberg Chair and professor of medicine, at Harvard Medical School, highlights key trials in kidney cancer presented at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting.